What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight (Luke 16:15).

Some of the things we prize, God cares for not at all. Some of the things we crave and hope for and yearn after, God couldn’t care less about. And some of the things we think are important, God actually detests.

It’s a question of perspectives and values. To put it bluntly, God doesn’t see things as we do. He doesn’t measure with our yardstick or weigh with our scale. He uses his own.

The Way God Measures

For most people, that’s not a problem. “God can value anything he wants . . . so long as he doesn’t expect me to go along.” For those of us who claim to be Christian, however, “going along” is the whole point. God expects his values to become ours. He expects us to exchange our sense of priorities for his. He expects us to measure our lives by his yardstick, not our own. That, in fact, comprises the heart of discipleship—“Not my will, but yours be done.”

But that’s hard for us. We resist God’s yardstick. Adopting his values is difficult. Relinquishing our own is harder still.

Take money, for instance. God doesn’t value money much. He doesn’t count on it like we do. He doesn’t think it’s the answer to most of life’s problems. Oh, he knows we need money, that we can’t eat the Beatitudes or raise a family on prayer alone. He understands we are flesh and the flesh has to be fed, sheltered, clothed, and comforted. But money—for God—is mostly a means of doing merely that. It’s not a reason for living. It’s not a goal to be pursued in and of itself. It shouldn’t be confused with “treasure.”

In God’s economy, there are matters vastly more valuable than dollars. Treasure is gained in the spiritual realm through the use of character currencies: integrity, humility, and contentment. There’s treasure to be found in the currency of faith: trust, priorities, suffering, and sacrifice. There is, especially, a relational currency God greatly values: generosity, compassion, unity, forgiveness. But none of those treasures can be contained in chests or purchased with dollars.

The Gifts God Gives

God wants us to be rich. He wants us to pile up treasure. But he wants for us the kind of wealth he values. He’s not all that concerned, not all that motivated, to help us accumulate the sort of riches that can be measured by the material.

And that’s difficult for us because we live in a world that has shaped our priorities, skewed our perspectives, and taught us what to value. Rather than permitting God to challenge those values—to confront and replace them—a great deal of Christian energy is expended in the attempt to win God’s approval and support of the values we are loathe to abandon.

We want God to baptize our standard of living, our pursuit of financial security, our accumulation of money. We want his approval of large houses, large bank accounts, large credit card limits. We want him to look at the American dream, the consumer culture, our capitalistic dreams and pronounce, “It is good.”

And so we run after gospels that offer health and wealth as the reward of faithfulness. We buy books that teach us to pray for our daily bread and our successful businesses and our healthy retirement investments. We flock to preachers who regard success and prosperity as the rightful inheritance of God’s true children.

It is all theological smoke and mirrors, imposing on God a value system that is foreign to his very nature. It is culture dictating the shape of faith. And, in this, we are culture’s collaborators.

It’s easy to talk about Christ and culture so long as we limit the discussion to which movies we watch or what opinions we hold on various social issues. It’s easy to relegate the culture wars to matters sexual and political and philosophical.

But while we fight the culture war on all those other fronts, the enemy is stealing a march on the flank of the material. He has broken through our lines and captured the way we think about money—our attitudes about it, our accumulation of it, how we spend it, how we value it. We busily decry alternative lifestyles and, all the while, Satan is convincing us to measure our material lifestyle by our neighbor, to rejoice in the abundance of our possessions, and to store away many good things for ourselves so that we can face the future with confidence.

Our attitude about money is the truest litmus test of whether we are overcoming culture or culture is overcoming us. It always has been. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” For too many of us, the treasure we claim on Sundays and the treasure we love the rest of the week are two different things. |L

OTHER COLUMNS:
November 8, 2009 - Why I believe in God
October 25, 2009 - Commuting in days of evil
October 11, 2009 - Poets and don’t know it
September 27, 2009 - How Hollywood proves abortion is wrong
September 13, 2009 - Significance
August 30, 2009 - Dance alternatives
August 16, 2009 - Gluttons for gossip
August 2, 2009 - Truth from Twilight
July 19, 2009 - Visitor-friendly churches
July 5, 2009 - The Shack
June 21, 2009 - When forgiveness fails
June 7, 2009 - Re-imagining Education (Part Six)
May 24, 2009 - We are not alone
May 3, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part five)
April 26, 2009 - Conviction
April 12, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part four)
March 29, 2009 - An evangelistic proposal
March 15, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part three)
March 1, 2009 - He makes me sick
February 15, 2009 - Re-imagining education (Part Two)
February 1, 2009 - Spiritual insecurity
January 18, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part one)
January 4, 2009 - Church and politics
December 21, 2008 - Heaven’s music
December 7, 2008 - The church and marriage
November 23, 2008 - God and the president
November 9, 2008 - A time for courage
October 26, 2008 - Likes and dislikes: the Prince Caspian movie
October 12, 2008 - What’s that noise?
September 28, 2008 - Modesty matters (part two)
September 14, 2008 - All it takes is some TLC
August 31, 2008 - Modesty matters (part one)
August 17, 2008 - What would you fight for?
August 3, 2008 - Staying through the credits
July 20, 2008 - Honor to whom honor
July 6, 2008 - Tyler Perry and the movies you’re missing
June 22, 2008 - The peaceable kingdom
May 25, 2008 - Another generation grew up
May 25, 2008 - Technology and the Bible (part two)
May 11, 2008 - Technology and the Bible (part one)
April 27, 2008 - What is truth?
April 13, 2008 - And the geek shall inherit the earth
March 30, 2008 - A charactered God
March 16, 2008 - The college choice (part two)
March 2, 2008 - Good news can be hard to hear
February 17, 2008 - The college choice (part one)
February 5, 2008 - Ten suggestions for a godly standard of living
January 20, 2008 - Expelled: that “Bueller” guy’s pro-God movie
January 6, 2008 - Choosing a lifestyle
December 23, 2007 - Teachable TV?
December 9, 2007 - Owners or stewards?
November 25, 2007 - Christians teaching Christians to change TV and film
November 11, 2007 - My money is God’s business
October 28, 2007 - Navigating under the radar
September 30, 2007 - Movie moments
September 16, 2007 - God’s economics
September 2, 2007 - The best books to read
August 19, 2007 - There’s a rat in ‘separate’
August 5, 2007 - The art of reading
July 22, 2007 - Atheist chic
July 8, 2007 - Why books matter: the sequel
June 10, 2007 - Books: why they matter
June 3, 2007 - The non-impact of “The Lost Tomb of Jesus”
May 27, 2007 - The universal gospel
May 13, 2007 - Loving Muslims through culture
April 29, 2007 - Hope
April 15, 2007 - God in the dark
April 1, 2007 - The gospel goes to the movies
March 18, 2007 - What the Bible movies can teach us
March 4, 2007 - What will you hurt for?
February 18, 2007 - Why Heroes . . .
February 4, 2007 - Give peace a chance
January 21, 2007 - When fairy tales are true
January 7, 2007 - WYSIWYG lives
December 31, 2006 - What’s coming next?
December 17, 2006 - Mercy, mercy
December 3, 2006 - Proof of evolution!
November 19, 2006 - Hungering for God
November 5, 2006 - Violence and government, war and peace
October 22, 2006 - The mighty meek
October 8, 2006 - The Battlestar and the Bible
September 24, 2006 - Soap for the soul
September 10, 2006 - Right vs. cool
August 27, 2006 - The painful truth
August 13, 2006 - More Lies Hollywood Tells
July 30, 2006 - Christian counter culture
July 16, 2006 - The lies Hollywood tells